Friday night on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, Zanny Minton Beddoes, the economics editor for the Economist magazine, expressed dread that the possibility Rick Santorum could win the Republican presidential nomination “completely terrifies me. I mean, how many decades back, how many centuries back does he want to take us?” She proceeded to relay the derogatory charge “Santorum would be a fine mind for the 13th century.”

The British-born Beddoes, now based in Washington, DC, took up Santorum’s 2006 book, It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good:

I read a little bit of his book this week, which is terrifying – logical, but terrifying – and there was a review of it, I think it was the Philadelphia Inquirer when it first came out and it said that Santorum would be a fine mind for the 13th century. And it’s kind of right. It’s logical, it’s natural law, it’s the kind of Catholic absolutist view of the world of several centuries ago.